My new home is wonderful. My landlord is fabulous--he wears scarves and has a giant sparkly pink ring. He has two little poodles and a habit of clasping his hands under his chin. His English is very nearly terrible, but he speaks it so quickly and calmly that I always end up thinking that it's my fault I'm struggling to interpret his burbling vowels.
He also has a wife and a couple of sons and daughters, who help him run this lovely, flower-filled guesthouse. Viva la difference.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
Away/at home
luang prabang is especially beautiful after having been away. If you're going to live your life within about one square mile, it might as well be this one.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Dubious
There's something charming about charmless Dubai. There are hideous buildings, certainly, but there aren't so many of them that you can't focus on the nice ones. In fact, there are so few that it becomes easy enough to only look at the nice ones.
It's dead, hugely dead—there's hardly anything alive but people and their strange, humpy monuments, and perhaps Dubai is hard to hate because it's so humanly imperfect. Let's build a huge palace of consumption, for example, but to alleviate our guilt let's put an aquarium in the middle of it, so perhaps we'll learn something by osmosis, as it were. (I realize the aquarium probably wasn't put there to alleviate my particular guilt, but let's just imagine...).
The big building (the biggest, in fact), the Burj Khalifa, is spectacular. It just is. The fountains in front, which dance every 30 minutes, which I thought would be hideously tacky, are frankly delightful, and that fact that during my dinner across from them they performed to first “Thriller,” then Mozart, and then the theme from “Bonanza” only made me love the whole damn thing even more.
This kind of awful decadence is something we gush over when it's a few centuries in the rear-view. It's just disconcerting to be in it in the here and now. I'm finding it hard to reconcile my love for the relics of it with my desire to hate its current incarnation. It seems dishonest.
And there's just nothing there but man, it seems. It's so strange.
It's dead, hugely dead—there's hardly anything alive but people and their strange, humpy monuments, and perhaps Dubai is hard to hate because it's so humanly imperfect. Let's build a huge palace of consumption, for example, but to alleviate our guilt let's put an aquarium in the middle of it, so perhaps we'll learn something by osmosis, as it were. (I realize the aquarium probably wasn't put there to alleviate my particular guilt, but let's just imagine...).
The big building (the biggest, in fact), the Burj Khalifa, is spectacular. It just is. The fountains in front, which dance every 30 minutes, which I thought would be hideously tacky, are frankly delightful, and that fact that during my dinner across from them they performed to first “Thriller,” then Mozart, and then the theme from “Bonanza” only made me love the whole damn thing even more.
This kind of awful decadence is something we gush over when it's a few centuries in the rear-view. It's just disconcerting to be in it in the here and now. I'm finding it hard to reconcile my love for the relics of it with my desire to hate its current incarnation. It seems dishonest.
And there's just nothing there but man, it seems. It's so strange.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
sight of the day
Riding home from a meeting: a grown man, transporting a load of firewood and a machete on his bike. Which had pink training wheels.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Turning Asian of the day
Turning Asian of the day: This morning I had a big bowl of noodle soup, THEN coffee.
Things I've learned: The streetside lice inspections one sees are not actually that. I learned this while Lisa was cutting my hair recently. In addition to finding my first grey (no, I haven't let that go yet) she found a bunch of what Lao people call "itchy hairs." These are the coarse, kinky hairs that tend to grow out of the top of one's head. Well, Lao heads. And my head. I remember sitting in class in high school--probably in geometry or physics or something else I hated--and systematically feeling for and pulling out these strangely-textured, usually pitch-black hairs. It was a way to pass the time, and I had plenty of hair to go around, so I didn't reckon I'd miss them.
In Lao PDR, people believe these hairs 'eat' your other hairs. They'll take over your head, make your other hair fall out, and do other bad things. So when you see women squatting next to each other in the mornings, picking through each other's hair, they're not looking for lice, they're pulling out these itchy hairs. Who'd have guessed?
The public blackhead and booger extractions are still, as far as I know, what they seem.
I dropped a pair of chopsticks. I swear the sound they made as the clattered on the floor was “bo pen gnang”. Today is good.
Things I've learned: The streetside lice inspections one sees are not actually that. I learned this while Lisa was cutting my hair recently. In addition to finding my first grey (no, I haven't let that go yet) she found a bunch of what Lao people call "itchy hairs." These are the coarse, kinky hairs that tend to grow out of the top of one's head. Well, Lao heads. And my head. I remember sitting in class in high school--probably in geometry or physics or something else I hated--and systematically feeling for and pulling out these strangely-textured, usually pitch-black hairs. It was a way to pass the time, and I had plenty of hair to go around, so I didn't reckon I'd miss them.
In Lao PDR, people believe these hairs 'eat' your other hairs. They'll take over your head, make your other hair fall out, and do other bad things. So when you see women squatting next to each other in the mornings, picking through each other's hair, they're not looking for lice, they're pulling out these itchy hairs. Who'd have guessed?
The public blackhead and booger extractions are still, as far as I know, what they seem.
I dropped a pair of chopsticks. I swear the sound they made as the clattered on the floor was “bo pen gnang”. Today is good.
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